Let's Huddle, Women

"Why can't a woman take after a man?" sang an exasperated Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. That tacit sentiment all too often pervades male-dominated executive suites, report Social Psychologists Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim of Boston's Simmons College. In their new book, The Managerial Woman (Anchor-Doubleday; $7.95), based on in-depth interviews with 125 business-oriented women, they analyze why so few women have become top corporate executives. Their answer: most women never learned to play football or other team sports. For corporate men, whom the authors got to know as company consultants and teachers, life is one long battle on a metaphorical gridiron. Women who grow up in sex-stereotyped America playing tennis or figure-skating do not know how to plan ahead, take risks, deal easily with victory and defeat, play on a team.

Thus women enter a corporate world that is still governed by the male life-style not knowing the subliminal rules of the game. Few become part of the informal corporate insider system that decides matters in unannounced huddles; most women executives do not even realize that it exists (perhaps partly because many huddles assemble by chance in the men's room).

Self-Improvement. Women executives, say Hennig and Jardim, are passive and overspecialized. They underestimate their own achievements and often attribute their successes to luck; even when highly competent, they doubt themselves and spend much time on self-improvement. Men--those who become top executives anyway--assume they are competent and set out to see that somebody important realizes it. Women play it safe, wait to be recognized, then blame themselves when they are not rewarded--rather than raising the corporate equivalent of the athlete's cry: "Play me or trade me."

But of course a few women do become top executives. Why? Hennig had found earlier--in a study of the careers of 25 company presidents and vice presidents that earned her a doctorate from the Harvard Business School--that such successful women were first-born or only children. They grew up very close to their fathers, who shared activities with them as if they were boys. Thus they acquired a familiarity with the unwritten rules and a strong selfesteem, which carried them through the tryouts of their early years and landed them places at the middle-management level. At that point, the women faced an identity crisis: they had shelved their femininity for a decade in order to concentrate on their work, and they felt both a sense of personal loss and a desire to continue their careers. All eventually resolved this conflict by relaxing, taking a broader perspective of their lives and their responsibilities--and often by marrying older men who already had families. Women who fail to redefine their lives in that way, Hennig and Jardim found as they interviewed other women in the course of their research, often stay in middle management, becoming even more overspecialized and embittered.

Since would-be women executives cannot arrange to be born the only children of fathers who treat them like boys, The Managerial Woman offers some advice, which amounts to learning to play the game the way men do:

>Define your goals: analyze the costs and rewards of a management career. What do you really want 5, 10, 20 years from now? Set specific targets.

> Acquire technical competence, but beware of overinvesting in a specialty: be ready for a broader perspective.

> Look for someone in a higher management position who will act as your mentor and coach. Expand your horizons and make yourself visible to other departments.

> Be prepared to take risks and sometimes to fail, but stay on the lookout for opportunities to prove your managerial skills.

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